Paul Magnano Class Journal Week 4

Reflection on Work

What was the purpose of this assignment? To help us become more familiar with matlab, as well as to help us better understand the relationships between various parameters and state variables in the equations we are using to model chemostats.

What aspect of this assignment came most easily to you? The inital graph using matlab.

What aspect of this assignment was the most challenging for you? The 3 questions were very confusing for me because I wasn't in class on tuesday, so for the most part I kind of had to guess my way through it.

What (yet) do you not understand? Why we had to do pages of algebra..

Read and Reflect

Go back over the ter Schure paper. Which parameters in our model can you extract from the paper? Which must be found by some other methods? What steady states are provided in the paper? You could extract the rate of nutrient inflow namely ammonia (q in our model), net growth rate namely the rate of biomass increase (y in our model), nutrient saturation rate namely ammonia flux (K in our model). You could determine V, the nutrient consumption rate by using the rate of ammonia going into the cell and the residual ammonia left, but it is not explicitly listed in the paper. The steady state for ammonia concentration is given (calculated as ammonia flux into biomass) and is shown to be 1.1 mmol/(gh).

Kevin McKay Class Journal Week 4

Reflection

What was the purpose of this assigment?

Well other than making us suffer through heavy algebra, it helped us see the relationship between certain parameters in equations that we defied i class. It allowed us to model a system and compare our results to an actual experiment.

What aspect of the assignment was easiest?

Doing the actual math.

What was most challenging?

Being patient with how tedious using the computer is for me.

What do you not understand?

Why we had to do all of the algebra why not just give us the steady states.